- Università: Bocconi
- Docenti:
Fabrizio Zerbini
- Studenti:
Alessandro Alazio, Wenjing Bao, Bianca Borghi, Rita Gonzalez Delgado, Mariana Pettorruso, Filippo Villa
Our retailing idea emerges as a solution for a new rising portion of urban population: busy working women that have little time to shop. As Europe is witnessing a surge in female occupation rates and, consequently, in women’s purchasing power, women with very little time are a growing demographic sector. At the same time European women are having children later in life, which contributes to increasing the general expenditure on shopping. HEAD2TO offers a solution to women that are tired of a friction-full shopping experience: it is a point of sale organized in a logical sequence of aisles, each dedicated to a specific clothing category, from underwear to coats and accessories.
HEAD2TO brings a novelty in retailing: it is the first ever clothing shop organized in logical sequence to create outfits step-by-step. Every room has its own clothing category, to ensure a seamless shopping experience, perfect for customers with no time to spare. The store is divided into six clothing areas plus entrance and exit, for a total of 500 squared meters:
1. Entrance
2. Underwear
3. Bottoms
4. Knitwear
5. Shoes
6. Coats
7. Accessories
8. Fitting rooms & checkout
The innovative shopping journey begins at the entrance, where the shopper is given a reusable tote bag decorated with a guidance map and a QR code from which one can book a spot in the fitting rooms, to avoid queues. The customer follows on through the quick forced path throughout which three virtual try-ons screens are positioned for those who are in a hurry and have no time nor energy to try-on clothes.
Each piece is labeled with a barcode that becomes useful once inside the fitting room. Indeed, by scanning it, a customer can ask the shopping assistant to change that item’s size or color. The H2T experience comes to an end at the check-out. To better reach the target, HEAD2TO will be in central and reachable areas with a high concentration of companies’ offices in big cities so to optimize shopping time for working women. The first opening will be in Porta Nuova (Milan, Italy), an area with a high density of companies.
After a careful segmentation analysis, we defined the needs and wants of our target: working women. HEAD2TO’s typical customer is thus a modern and independent working woman that is looking for good quality clothing for a reasonable price given her medium level elasticity. She is part of a segment that we like to call the “fair quality, fair price shopper”. Our store will thus be positioned in-between high-end and low-end fashion stores, as this medium positioning is featured by a lower level of rivalry and allows for an
easier entrance. She is sustainability-oriented, against fast fashion, highly skilled with technology, and extremely busy. To fully understand the needs of our persona, we surveyed 50 working women aged 25 to 45 on their attitudes towards apparel and footwear shopping, and we collected the following result:
- 84% think that shopping has become too messy because shops are too crowded & the assortment is un-organized & shopping has become time consuming & stores lacks customer service:
- 86% do not have time to go shopping
- 82% would be more likely to visit a shop if it was close to one’s office
- 96% would be interested in a store organized in a logical sequence
HEAD2TO is also a place where the planet and society are supported, in line with recent macrotrends. Firstly, shoppers are increasingly concerned for the environment and their willingness to pay increases with the eco-friendly impact of brands (82%). Secondly, fashion consumers are interested in contributing to the growth of emerging young brands that are less known and need a push to survive in such a saturated market. As such, in this case too 66% consumers would be willing to spend more on such emerging brands. We aim at fulfilling the need of this emerging portion of the market by providing them with excellent quality clothing from selected sustainable and emerging brands at competitive prices in-between the mass and the premium fashion market, with two collections per year.
From our survey, 92% of respondents were interested in this idea. We aim to achieve profitability from the second operating year and to expand in other Italian cities with a high number of our target client (Rome, Florence, Turin…). The concept is however entirely replicable throughout Europe too, in the business and financial districts of its main cities. This is because the increasing trends of female occupation rate, environmental concerns and hostility towards fast fashion are common throughout the continent.
As such, our long-term goal would be to expand to Europe’s main cities, starting with the fashion capitals Paris and London.
